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What Is the Future of Business Intelligence?
Roland Piquepaille writes "Mitch Betts asked this question to many technology leaders in the field of business intelligence. Here is one selected prediction. 'In five years, 100 million people will be using an information-visualization tool on a near-daily basis. And products that have visualization as one of their top three features will earn $1 billion per year,' says Ramana Rao, founder and chief technology officer, Inxight Software Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif. Check this column for more forecasts and an update on the adoption of so-called 'executive dashboards.' You also can read the original Computerworld article for even more information."
In the future, it will still be mythical...
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Sounds like the old saw about "Military Intelligence" to me...a contradiction in terms.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
At Southwest Airlines, they call them cockpits, and they're specialized, so that the guy in charge of putting peanuts on airplanes gets a different view than the guy who's in charge of purchasing jet fuel.
Dang. I thought my job sucked.
In five years, 100 million people will be using an information-visualization tool on a near-daily basis
How many people use graphs, pie charts, etc. daily? Look at the newspaper and see how many are in the financial section. How many people have the default stock ticker in their AIM window?
Yeah, I thought so......these aren't the droids you are looking for, move along...
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
In five years, 100 million people will be using an information-visualization tool on a near-daily basis.
Heck, that's true now. They're called graphs.
But it does bolster my prediction that in five years three nines or better of the pundents attempting to capitalize on our paradigms will be using lingustic chicanery to obsfucate their metheodology.
-- MarkusQ
Business intelligence is an oxymoron.
What they really need in business is to find that all-elusive step, y'know they one right before "4) Profit!"
Anyway, regarding visualization software (let's not get into the buzzword aspects of this concept), do you really think CEOs will use it? Half of them don't even use email yet (I hear one or two are known for having their secretaries print out their emails for them). They're notoriously technologically illiterate. I assume they'll remain that way until the next generation or two succeed them (ie. people that have grown up being computer literate).
Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
Compitent, in touch, gutsy middle management.
Many haven't worked with what they manage (UNIX, Windows, networking, accounting, QA, etc). Because of this they don't understand the day to day working of the people and products they manage.
They also need to be in touch. From my experience when the boss calls a meeting and asks us to tell him or her what we need to change nobody speaks up. We need management we feel we can talk to without fear of retribution. Also, they need to keep their ears open for the watercooler gossip they will never hear directly. It helps judge morale, allows them to quell or substantiate rumors and find out what the employees really think.
The last, and largest one, is gutsy. This means when the workers tell a manager something that he or she can't take care of directly they should have the guts to take it to their manager to help. I've seen too many managers who kiss ass and are afraid to put a small tarnish on their reputation to go to bat for their employees.
The problems we face now aren't with the technology, but with the people.
Hmmm, did they arrive at this figure based upon the pr0n industry?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
It sounds like the author had a list of key/buzz words and tried to squeeze a payday out of it... it's an old term paper trick as well. How did this dreck find its place into a publication?
Laws are for people with no friends.
..is bunk.
To qoute the article; Within five years, terms such as business intelligence ... will have all but disappeared. Which may be a good thing, as all to many businesses these days seems to have their inteligence challenged by thinking up a business plan of the kind that ends in "3. PROFIT!!", and all to often has a bulletpoint just above there they'll get back to...
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
"What Is the Future of Business Intelligence?"
PHB's will multiply drastically, afterall management is more motivational to employees than paying them more. Cubicles will be reduced in size by 50% so they can be more efficient and fit more people per square meter. Computers will be ridiculously faster, so ambitious deadlines will be even more ambitious, just in time to meet that ever so important tradeshow deadline. And since technology will be a lot cheaper in the future, budgets will be halved over and over again in order to make sure projects under-deliver.
Business Intelligence, 100 years from now, will drop like a rock.
"Derp de derp."
It doesn't work. Surprised, huh? ;)
The "dashboards" provided green/yellow/red status with click-through to actual data points.
The execs spent so much time obsessing over the quality of data in the dashboards and fixing problems when they arose that they never got any actual use out of them.
It just gives execs one more thing to complain about and blame on other people to get unreasonable performance gains (that in reality areperformance losses in the form of lowered morale and sabotage.)
I figure that in the near future most businesses will become more integrated with the Internet. The potential for customers to order goods without ever leaving their home is a tremndous potential market that can only grow as more people (especially Americans) get online. Given the laws of the United States concerning "security" passed in the last few years, I disagree with the author's comment that data mining will become a thing of the past. Quite the opposite, I think that with more information becoming readily available on the Internet that data mining will be used even more to attempt to forecast customer's desires before they even start actively shopping. With increased computing capacity and faster Internet access, it should only make data mining that much easier.
Certainly data mining and "buisness intelligence" can save corporations advertising dollars, but what about the people who buck the trends? Advertisers will tap into the internet thanks to small businesses who could readily advertise for much less money to the whole world, if need be. Local mini-webs for individual cities like Yahoo sets up would be perfect places for such advertising. Sadly, I also predict that AOL and Microsoft will try to merge at some point soon to facilitate their own data mining practices and to try to control most of these local webs. Their offers of integrated services from web access to web navigation to easy-to-understand web tools are already one of their biggest selling points. I say try to merge because despite current politics and recent events there are still legal limits to corporate mergers.
Regardless, I think companies will try to start integrating more of the Internet into their business. Small businesses will start using data mining as the technologies behind it become more easily exploited. And larger computer companies will probably start trying to consolidate in order to offer their own browsers, OSes (Linux derivatives for the masses seems likely to compete with Billy), and internet connection services all in one package.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
I don't mean to be insulting, but many managers are twits, and no matter what kind of wonderful software they have access to they still have to use their own brains to interpret, understand, and apply the data presented.
;)
I take university courses in management, and am repeatedly awestruck by the sheer stupidity of some of my peers. Many of them graduate and go on to become rather useless business people.
Always remember, Incompetent People Rarely Know They Are
The CEU or press guy of a company that makes X tells us that in future, there will be a H U G E market for X, and X will be ubiquitous.
My my, we would be utter fools not to invest all our spare money in his dot-bomb, wouldn't we?
Sheesh.
Today, consumers may be amused at marketers' clumsy attempts to personalize service, like being offered a new Lexus while shopping for a used Pinto. But consumers won't laugh at such amateur antics in two years or so. And neither will chief financial officers, who will refuse to pay for collecting and analyzing data that gets used unintelligently.
I'll show all those idiots who laughed at me! I'm make them all pay! They called me mad. They said fully automated application of our entire personal user information database into directed marketing initiatives with a negligable margin of error was a pipe dream! They cancelled my funding. Now who's laughing? Enjoy your Lexuses.... FOOLS!
Technology has moved on leaps and bounds in the last century, and our brains are not really that capable of keeping up.
;) are geniuses.
The vast majority of people that are managers will not have the mental capacity to process this information in the time frame with which an "executive dashboard" promises to deliver it.
And i'm not saying that in a cruel way - i'm not getting at managers or anyone, i'm saying that _we_ human beings, as a race - the vast majority of us cannot process information that quickly.
These tools are going to require the mental capacity of a "Genius" to be able to capitalise from them, and very, very few of us, particularly those in middle management positions
So someone modded you down a few times... I have had that happen to myself more than once - and the reason I'm posting this AC is to avoid getting a -1 Offtopic to my name. Still, you must try to bend your mind around why you're getting modded down, and from reading your comment it is presumably because you're off topic, trying to troll, acts like an idiot or insults people.
Apart from that, I would suggest going for a long walk out in the freah air. It is amasingly how that clears the mind.
Well then. Here we have a senior officer and founder of a dot-com that makes software to graphically analyze databases telling us how in the future information visualization will be the next hot thing. When google news does this, there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the net. Slashdot, Press Releases for Nerds?
I undertand this, and I think I know what they are talking about when they mention the estimates. Business Intelligence is a large and all-encompassing field, I've been working as a consultant in this particular industry for three and a half years. Business spending on BI systems incorporates the entire lifecycle of such implementations, not just simple pretty graphs at the end. It includes areas such as Business Analysys which consists of requirement gathering, Data modelling for designing optimal storage for large volumes of historical data, ETL and Data Warehousing, then once you have a solid foundation for your decision support system (DSS) you can proceed onto the reporting and analytics and presentation.
Do I believe it is a large industry with a lot of spending, yes I do. Especially in these times where businesses are attempting to optimize their processes and reduce spending. Decision support systems through Business Intelligence are a big aide to those in charge.
Regards,
Tom Wolniewicz; BMath, CS, OCP
tom@fieldofwebs.com
Everyone will be using that my company is writing today - it will be a billion dollar market. Please give me some money now so you can be in at the ground floor.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
I think the future of Business Intelligence is realizing that in traditional reporting, people generate these big ass long reports.
But you can simplify this, by allowing them to specify first what they want to interrogate, and then zoom in as necessary.
The idea is, their curiosity can help guide them, to what it is they need to look at. Using this they can drill down easily into the information and prevent information overload
I have developed a demo of this with a Sales Reporting product called Sales Buddy. You can see the demo at http://www.interactivereporting.net
will be more industrial/commercial espionage. and in this america is so sadly behind.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
"Products that have visualization as one of their top three features will earn $1 billion per year."
There's nothing I love quite so much as business analysts telling us "for sure" what's going to be hot in three to five years. Either it's something so obvious no one can miss it (like "the Internet will be big!"), or else they're horribly wrong.
Anyone remember how "push" technology was going to be the Next Big Thing? How the real money on the Internet was pushing sports scores and stock tickers out to people so they could avaoid all that tiresome clicking? Remember the Wired cover story on Push? Well, I get the same feeling about "executive dashboards." Show me a man who has graph on his desktop showing up to the minute price trends on hog belly futures, and I'll show you a man ready to replicate the same mistakes that a million or so day traders made during the Internet bubble: having access to instant information doesn't mean you understand the information you're seeing.
The businesses which can benefit the most from real-time information have already implamented it, and not as "executive dashboards." Think of WallMart. Or the U.S. Army. But they're designed to flow the information as hard data to people who actually use the information, rather than as pretty graphs to executives. You want to empower people at all levels of your organization, not micromanage them.
Is visualization useful? Sure, that's why we have things like Visio, PowerPoint, and Keynote. But never mistake up-to-the-minute readouts of information for a true understanding of that underlying data.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I've got off-topic "to my name", as well as a couple of '-1 trolls'. They hang on the wall right along with the '+5 funny' and the '+3 insightful'
I agree that the grandparent post was flame-baiting, but hiding behind AC just for the sake of not getting a certain mod by your name is...well, it's crap, imho. At least it is if you're stating your honest opinion and not just stirring up shit.
Luckily, the average slashdot reader is pretty smart. I'm sure this 'news' registered pretty high on most peoples' B.S. meters.
Seems like most of the predictions go something like this....
"Hot new technology 'A' will be widely adopted and a multi-billion dollar industry in the next 3-5 years." -- Bob Anonomous, CEO vaporwhere corp, a hot new technology 'A' startup.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
Packet sniffing.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
I used to work for Computer Associates and on their flagship product Unicenter TNG. The way we managed to sell to the excutives was to show them the TNG visualization feature which was almost like a computer game - where you could fly in to your regional data center , view a maze of your servers , fly into a server and pick up an application to fix . Lots of very cool toys to do somthing you could do faster and more easily with a simpler GUI. The CEO/CIO/CFO loved the demo and signed off on the purchase but the system administrators never ever used that interface -- they stuck to command line or windows interfaces. The System admins didn't object as the software did provide a useful and important solution for them.
.The software has to go and do something useful to win favor with middle tier managers and administrators , who will be the ones actually using it.
Visualization can not be a goal in itself
"Business Intelligence" is almost as oxymoronic as "military intelligence". At least in my experience with managers that have no idea about technology but yet think they can dictate how it is run.
today is spelling optional day.
Not to make too big of a shameless plug, but my www.knowledgebooks.com stuff tries to be sort-of competitive with Inxight (although I have just been working on this stuff about 1/3 time for a few years - I will acknowledge that they have a head start :-).
I really believe that most people will routinely use what I would call information appliances - systems that basically remember our entire digital lives and provide ways to quickly find information based on topic, time of creation/modification, linked from other similar data or experiences, etc.
One huge problem that I have as a developer (as I have recently talked about on my blog) is that if you are not Microsoft and can not peek inside proprietary data and file formats, then you have a difficult time writing software that runs in the background and has access to everything that you are doing on your computer. Storage, information retrieval, backups, etc. are all solveable problems, but proprietary data formats used by > 90% of the desktop market are a major problem.
One possible idea would be integration with OpenOffice and live with a small market share.
-Mark
Business intelligence, at least in my view, has always been about finding a way to take what employees know and marginalizing the employee.
Think about it. The reason a lot of folks have jobs is because they have a specific skills and knowledge. If you allow someone to siphon off that knowledge, it marginalizes the employee.
Business Intelligence Segmentation Fault(Core Dumped)
Support Israeli punk bands. Man Alive.
Huh wha? ;)
In the immortal words of Megadeth, "...two words combined that can't make sense."
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
you mean desktop workstations, PDAs, and laptops?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Business Intelligence... it's about time!
All these Buzzword of the Month fads seem to be attempts to make up for things found lacking in the real world. I was hoping that with "Business Intelligence" we had finally gotten to the root problem. Instead, it's just additional evidence of the root problem.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
I don't know about you, but most of the languages I'm familiar with pronouce 'x' with a 'SH' sound when it's part of a word.
Which of course makes the name in-shite.
Which is surprisingly worse than a company I worked for once called digital-freq pronounced 'digital-freak' Are there too many names copyrighted right now or something. Anything that makes you want to mumble your companies name when telling it to your friends should never have made it that far.
Speculative investment has to move towards startups (I.E., something that is really new and worth exploring) and not for 401K. What originally pissed me off about this was hearing senior execs virtually gushing about their ROI.
I hate the bell curve concept, but there are those that are desperately trying to make it work within the now dead corp/marketing world.
Once the MBAs gained control, all was lost.
My journal has hot
First, you have to make sure that your core data is good. The most useful way to organize it on the front end might not instantly show the best way for the CEO to see it on the back end. That means you have to translate that data (lists of order numbers, ordered products, persons ordering) into what the executive cares about (number of orders, products sold, money collected).
Whoops -- you have to find out what the executive cares about, don't you? And it might not be as simple as what he says he cares about. Are there any orders he doesn't want included -- samples, say? If some products are bundled, do we include the combined products as units, or unbundled? Is "money collected" just the cash we now have in the bank, or is it money we have been promised, or the expected revenue from what has been sold? Hopefully, the executive will find time to define his requirements this precisely.
Then you have to set up the system that can get your data from Point A to Point B. Easy if you are really certain what you are trying to answer. Not, if not.
Once that's done, then you can consider setting up a "dashboard" -- assuming you're sure that you can define the business precisely enough, and won't miss an important metric along the way, and the business won't change -- hasn't changed -- in the meantime.
I'm sure there are products that will make this process easier, but it's significant work for everyone involved. Although some of it could be automated, it will still require that the people setting it up actually THINK about what they are doing.
TSG
Visio, PowerPoint and Keynote are *TOYS* when it comes to visualization.
Keynote, in particular, has very limited visualization capabilities in comparision to the data that they provide. For serious analysis, it is necessary to move to Keynote data into a more versatile data and visualization management system.
As an example, consider a distributed system that processes thousands of transactions per second. Assume that there are roughly 300 different types of transactions (code paths). Assume the software and configuration get updated daily and that hardware is constantly coming in and out of production. The realtime visualization of that system is necessary to detect and isolate acute problems. A non-realtime approach is necessary to develop and refine strategy.
The majority of comments in this thread assume visualization implies the simple 2D graphs with which they are familiar. That may be due to the IT focus of the slashdot crowd vs. information analysis.
Far from it.
Anyone who is in business knows all to well that the primary concern of a business executive is figuring out how to game the system so he can rake in a bundle of loot by whatever means possible. His tools are fraud, lies, double-dealing and partnerships with like minded people, as the employees of American Airlines just found out.
Visualization software? Not bloody likely.
Consensus communities (AKA: Communities of Interest), using inter/intranet collaboration technologies in the future, will create the stronger, more competitive, and profitable businesses. Network sciences and knowledge-bases of the future will keep track of who is doing what and providing success for US. To stay competitive business will promote the (then discoverable and recognized) worker-bees and pack-mules with Type-1 personalities that are now being wasted and pushed out of the companies in mass. These days getting fired does not say you are good or bad ... it just says you are the target of an individual or fate/place. It is not like management is very aware of who is providing what is needed for success, the mission, or "profit".
...),
...), Dictators (Mao, Marcos, IdiAmin, ...), Megalomaniacs (Hitler, Stalin, Caligula, ...), Democracy (USA, Australia, Britain, ...) proves that we (humanity) can all do better without business, religion, dictators, ... running a country or subjugating people.
... humanity, (2) the pick-pocket (take the money/people and live well) evangelist always knowing the words of god and asking for money, and (3) the shake-&-bake (shake'em down and bake'em when done, [EM=Evil/Enemy Mankind]) religious leaders that can always justify murder in the name of
Three types of employees:
(1) those that make all things possible (hardware, software, science, technology, art, literature, commitment, loyalty, satisfaction, drive, profit,
(2) those that clock-punch, do-a-job, are socially functional, expects a $ for a $ effort, will plagiarize (Type-1's subordinates' work) for career advantages.
(3) those that are pet-rocks of CEO/SES/..., have exceptional (almost sociopathic) social skills, will take all the credit whenever things go right, point the finger at others when things go wrong, their prime purpose is to manage their career, because (they believe) only Type-3's can be successful bosses/managers (right, they know not their job).
I have known all three types at every position in Government and Business. Sometimes the Type-3 will be the CEO/SES, have other pet-rocks for affirmation, and believe that Type-2 folks do everything that is needed, because of Type-3 management ability, and Type-1 jerks/fools are the cause of all problems.
Following the above logic (THIS IS TRUE!): [A] Management says: (1) everyone is replaceable (get rid of the problems), (2) worker-bees cannot be promoted into management, because we need them to do the work, (3) pack-mules are great they get the work done and you can load them up with the important task. [B] Employees say: (1) screw-up move-up, (2) It is not what you know, but who you blow, (3) give head to get ahead. I have heard both "A&B" quotes from Type-3 management people, but employees (all three types) stick to the "B" quotes.
My observation is that a Capitalist Republic is little better than a Ferengi Republic, though either can be camouflaged as a Democratic Republic, Capitalism remains an economic model, (thank the gods) the Ferengi are fiction, and Democracy maintains the "Great Expectations" for all.
Any of these models/philosophies are better than all previous governing or ruling attempts by humanity. Kings/Emperors (Louie, Caesar, Napoleon,
Now back from the abstract to the concrete topic. It is not in the interest of some management teams to have (as equals) mutual respect with employees. Firing a few employees every now/then proves to anyone who may consider themselves equal that they are totally replaceable by other subordinate worker-bees, pack-mules, sub-human. Many capitalist businesses and religious institutions today (globally) are still fascist institutions. Religious institutions (all faiths) around the world continue to fall into three groups (1) the good and pious (I like and protect them) that do their best to help educate, feed, house,
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
"It's not that different from being a zoo keeper except that the monkeys are wearing a business suit."
And they both throw crap at you.
Gotta love when techies insist that terms are nonsense because they don't recognize them:
-Visualization
-Business Intelligence
-Executive Dashboards
-Balance Scorecard
These terms have been around for at least five years - and refer to how highly-enriched analytical information is delivered from data warehouses and other analytical applications. Nothing in the article was revolutionary.
Just because you don't hear these terms when knocking out Apache/PHP/Mysql websites doesn't mean they aren't legitimate.
What would you expect from a culture that's been brought up on television? Everyone has become accustomed to understanding things when they view them, and less by their analysis. If children were brought up reading books as entertainment, and reading newspapers for the daily news, we'd be predicting a technology that made information easier to analyze, like some sort of database technology. Instead, we've gone in the way of having to see some sort of representation of data, instead of being able to draw conclusions from the data itself.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
Select * from employees where clue > 0;
0 rows effected
Seems pretty clear to me.
Move along now....
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Strategy itself with always be a discrete deliberate act.
The Data Warehouse industry is full of this type of garbage. The people selling the data warehouse software promise real time analysis of end user activity...but the data warehouse product they sell depend on a nightly downloads...real time analysis is impossible.
The big problem in business intelligence is that buzz word sprouting bozos like this writer play their guru games, get in power and destroy companies.
BTW What's this noise about antiquities? Try pumping an antiquity in your Surburban and see where it gets you.
That aside, the point no one has brought up yet is that having second by second analysis of your sales, et al. is completely useless UNLESS you are also able to make second by second changes to your business to compensate for them. It is sort of like having a wristwatch that displayed time in nanoseconds. Sure, nanoseconds exist, they allow very precise time measurements, and so on an so forth. But other than physics experiments, would we really use them? Not only that, but if management makes stupid decisions on a daily basis, what do you think they'll be like on a minute-to-minute one?
In my opinion, this is just more management crap that they're trying to sell to businesses. Their work has dried up from the boom years and they decided, "hey, here's a way we can do something that appears to be useful and make corporations pay a lot of money for our software and consulting!" In five years, I predict, these people will have fleeced the gullible and have moved on to the next "hot" fake trend.
IAAL
Unfortunately, few in the slashdot community are familiar with this segment of our industry. Even fewer appear to be encumbered by this lack of knowledge.
The terminology and concepts referred to in these articles are mostly old hat, and anyone who's good and has experience with:
- decision support systems (DSS)
- business intelligence (BI - similar to DSS)
- data warehousing
- ods
- data marts
- reporting
- balanced score-cards
- data mining
- personalization
- SPC
- management science
should be familiar with all of them. Even some folks who've implemented BI components within large ERP & CRM applications should be familiar with them.
None of the projections are revolutionary - and none appear terribly insightful. Let's walk thru them one at a time:
1. In five years 100m people will use visualization tools almost daily: can't speak to the numbers, but I would be surprised if a majority of computer-users aren't using analytic technology daily - without even realizing it. As far as visualization goes, we're starting to enter the 'dancing-dog' phase of visualization - when the technology is over-applied without any thought of the usability or business impacts. So, yeah - we might see quite a lot of use, but I don't think we'll see nearly so much successful use of it.
2. BI will save $200 billion a year: perhaps, but I doubt that enough users are sufficiently info-literate (not computer-literate!) to pull this one off. Still, even with the primitive skills that people have in this area, BI can make efficiency improvements.
3. In 2-3 years quarterly-adjustments will be ditched in favor of real-time ones. The use of real-time analytics is increasing, though slowly. Micro-adjustments in pricing is only slowly be introduced, anything larger will continue to be adjusted on a quarterly basis - since it involves organizational changes - and people can't sustain real-time changes.
4. In 5 years BI & data mining terms will disappear: this is the one projection that I haven't heard before, and it seems the least likely. Both are essential prerequisites to embedding analytics in applications - since they help identify the rules, algorithms, etc to be used real-time. BI is also useful along-side analytical applications - since it allows you to measure what the real-time app is up to.
My own predictions? Analytics are definitely going to become more embedded into applications. More importantly however - people will become more accustomed to, and more comfortable with the basic concepts. And that's the real pre-requisite to making progress here. After all, the challenges to making better decisions based upon quantitive methods aren't technological - they're social. You need people who are info-literate, people who care, and organizations willing to question themselves. *That's* the real challenge!
The Christianity Meme was made wide spread by the invention of the Gutenberg press. Bwahahahahahaha. BWAHAHAHAHAH> *gasp* *gasp* MAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. You realize that almost all of Europe was Christian for about 1000 years before Gutenberg?
There's a book well-known in the humanities, Visual Thinking by Rudolph Arnheim, arguing that thinking is essentially visual. But most of the people working in cognitive science don't believe this, but instead that thinking is essentially linguistic (even if it's in something different from our public languages, such as Jerry Fodor's Language of Thought - where the most he'll give to visualization is that it can be an "image over a description").
... enough said.
Or perhaps visual and linguistic intelligence both exist in their own right, but some cultures do better at one or the other? If so, we're still a culture built on "In the beginning was the Word." We think we're so visual because of movies and whatever, but compared to the visual immersion of a traditional tribal, forest culture in its heyday we're nowhere with vision. So what does it do if we get a bunch of executives "visualizing"? Does it really make them smarter than if they work out their decisions logically, in language, in the traditional way of our culture? Or is it just a new way of dressing up the yes-men?
Even to the extent that we can importantly visualize, what gives you the clearer, more vital vision, a well crafted book - just words - or a comic? Because, let's face it, what software provides is at best like a cheap comic. And if financial markets are the measure of how bright visualization tools make us
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Just to point out the stupidity of English class after elementary school:
I'm currently taking advanced sophomore English. We spent 5 damn weeks learning that an oxymoron is a contradiction combined withing two words that when combined contain truth. 5 damn weeks! Now if you head on over to the dictionary you see no mention of any hidden truth.
Granted, I'm biased against English because of its lack of definitive structure, and that it has no universal truth. A grammar rule exists because it is in a textbook. It is in the textbook because it was common usage a century or two ago. So rather than than teach us what's true nowadays, English class is designed to hold language back against change.
ie. people that have grown up being computer literate
That's complete bullcrap. The rest of my generation doesn't know shit about computers beyond basic web browsing and email.
As for you being a racist; the primary advantage of the internet is that people like you don't realize that the person talking to you is of another nationality or race. A drawback is that people can't punch you in the face for basing your life on such a moronic principal.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
- If real-time data is going to the executive, and he's making changes based on it, then it's going the long way around. Send it right to the people making the changes.
- If the people making the changes are not able to do so independently based on said real-time data, you have a different problem to fix.
- Combinations of "Real time" and "Strategy" are inherently oxymoronic in any endeavor but sports and computer games. Strategy is supposed to reflect a long-term goal. You might change your tactics, but you don't want to change your strategy based on real-time data.*
- The larger truth in this is not specific to real-time data: You want as many people as possible to know as much as they can use about their current situation.
I would hope that is the real Future of Business Intelligence.TSG
*If anyone cares to dispute, please give examples of a successful change in a) strategy, not tactics based on b)real-time data, not finished intelligence, in any other arena.
The late '80s and early '90s saw mass layoffs of middle managers. That job market recovered somewhat, but in a few years it will happen again. Why have visualization techniques when the information those techniques display could be better analyzed by the computer displaying the information? Soon we will have computers advanced enough to cheaply perform advanced optimization such as nonlinear programming and forecasting with accuracy better than people can achieve, and enough data will be gathered in digital form by then so that the optimization techniques will have plenty of data to work with. Humans will still be required to answer intuitive issues such as understanding consumer needs, but little reason will exist to have humans answer questions like how many widgets to build next month. So long, pointy hair, don't forget to shut the door.
Is that the big companies (Cognos, IBM, Microsoft, and others) sell their slick products very well (hell I used to do it too) to the CEOs and executives. Unfortunately, those slick visualization tools require a HUGE amount of planning and organization in order to produce a single slick graph and/or chart.
Actual data marts or (god forbid) data warehouses which span information from disparate sources require expert project management and control, not to mention buy-in from all departments. Let's not gloss over the security issues, data retention, extraction, and a cornicopia of problems along with it.
Most of these companies get in the door through the following ways:
1. Slick sales
2. The loathed "proof of concept" in which they take some snippet of your data and create a cube which is just good enough to sell the rest of the product.
3. Exaggerated promises
Let's face it - very few companies have 'clean' data out there, and the required work to make dimensions stretch across the enterprise is mind-numbing. Then, just as you have it down and finished, some department installs an upgrade, or switches a product, and you have to redesign your dimensions and ETL all over again. Woohhoooo!
**sigh** I love BI, but companies typically just don't get the actual investment you have to make in order to get those great graphs and drill-downs.
&J
this is true--->".. companies fail because of management that gets rewarded for failure and criminal activity while employees suffer the consequences, lose their jobs, houses, college funds, retirement funds, ... "
There's also )IMO) the phenomenon now where corporations are run into the ground on purpose, so that later on another fictititous shell company can snag their assets for pennies on the dollar. So a lot of times what is perceived to be management indifference or peter principle failure to be realistic is actually just cold strategic thinking by corporate owners who are pirates, traitors in a sense. And the way business and law is set up now, and with the lessons of enron, etc in how to NOT get caught at it, I expect it to keep happening. In fact I am convinced the airline industry in general is being run into the ground on purpose so that "nationalization" will occur, but in actuality it will be the same cabals owning them and running them, just this time behind some more layers of obfuscation paperwork legalese drivel, with employees who can't strike, and who have no whistleblower protection under the Patriot Act, and where the records can be hidden due to "national security". I expect most industries to follow suit over the next generation into an international corporate state/global government.
I hope the downturn in computing continues long enough to put these 'experts' permanently out of a job. The computing world needs techno-illiterate prognostigators like it needs stevedores to forcast developments in space travel.
This is not a very good article.
Real Business Intelligence questions:
How will MS Analysis Services in Yukon affect
the market?
Any new web based budgeting/projection systems?
What about Hyperion Solutions and
"Performance Management"? Is Hyperion
in trouble?
Slashdotters know very,very little about this market.
PS Dating Mining != Business Intelligence
How many people in IT have heard BS like this time after time year after year...?
Its bad enough I have to hear this bullshit at work, 'forecasts' made by a buzzspeaking fuckstick that never ring true, but *please* don't let this garbage take over Slashdot...It may not be much, but this place is all I have left...*sniff*
Seriously, if you want to read garbage like this pick up a Information Week Red Herring or Business 2.0 then look at the people that are reading them.
Dont want to read it anymore do you?
/*(For the record, I think I misspelled "bull crap" in my grandparent post as well.)
g etIndexOf("English"));
1. My teacher didn't tell us that there "could be" truth behind an oxymoron; she definitively said that they all contain truth. We are required give the truth when writing about a particular oxmoron, and we would lose points for identifying "business ethics" as an oxymoron because it is theoretical today. It might be accepted as an example of verbal irony. It's hard to learn anything when you have to distrust all that you hear.
2. I'm not learning some all encompassing form of English, I'm learning American English accord to X publisher and Y teacher where X and Y change yearly. The year I'm losing points for plural possive pronouns to singular antecedents that we were taught as an exception to pronoun/antecedent agreement last year.
3. Perhaps English is harder from a grammar perspective because of all the senseless rules, but French requires one to learn 3 parts to every noun. I'd assume that an "independantly evolved" language such as Japanese or a Native American dialect would be much harder for someone to learn.
4. Let's try speaking Java for a change! */ sheenmaster.schedule.remove(sheenmaster.schedule.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Maybe some people like to live out their lives in front of the little screen, but people need to get out once in a while!
Plus, there are *many* things that are better purchased in person, so you don't waste time and money with reordering, reshipping etc. Clothing and fresh groceries, to name two of the most common.
The expectation that the consuming public will eventually order everything online is a bit out of sync with the fact that much of the public can't afford to do it! And besides, that hype-othesis went down in the year 2000, with too many examples (oh, that sock puppet petfood site for one.)
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
It needs to be said here is that BI is a new field and it is evolving. Are 100 million people going to use data visualization tools on a daily basis? Probably not however one can say that the adoption rate of such tools will increase in 5 years. I used to think that BI was just marketing spin until I started doing it a few years. Basically 10 years ago BI was not possible - companies could afford to create their own terabyte databases then mine that information. Today that is possible and tools such as Oracle Discoverer allow non-technical employees to execute complicated queries. That itself is crazy and it gets better. BI will make the decision making process faster and more accurate. Getting there will take time but it will happen. Dashboards are already a common name. For a glimpse into the future check out the following sites:
http://www.thebrain.com
http://www.visualthesaurus.com
http://www.smartmoney.com/marketmap
http://www.earthviewer.com
My favorite is the sector map offered by SmartMoney. It's an awesome tool however it is pricey and put this in front of your average sales person and they will freeze due to information overload.